I'm on my second Montana and find it a great bit of kit. Once I purchased it I used it as much a s I could to get used to it...all sorts of settings are in there.

The old one zapped after 90,000kms.....my ON/OFF button ended up perishing and falling into the unit so I use the RAM charger when I can to turn it off and on as you don't need to go anywhere near the ON/OFF button. Just a tip to think about.

I honed it down to having just nine icons on my home screen which allows it to do all I need at one touch or so.

I only use basecamp to store my routes as I can route plan on the GPS itself.

The problem with non-garmin maps is that they invalide your warranty. You need europe navigator and then look at countries specificallly for what you need for offroad - to cover all of europe is a mammoth task and not the right approach

I tried the free maps for Morocco, and while it looks like the Garmin ones, there were glitches in it that made me buy the Garmin version. One of the glitches was a T junction where the roads going in / out of the T were't joined together, so when used for routing it saw it as a no through road.

Another vote for the Montana series here discoverer/OS maps for UK and as mentioned OSM open source maps for elswhere I found it quite hard work myself gaining a practical ability with montana/different maps(mapsets)/basecamp but if you like/need a bit of structure to a trail trip I have'nt seen a better combo. Practice lots and learn to use Tracks as opposed to relying on routes in Garmin description. Expect to swear a bit, happy trails.

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bit greedy I know for purely roadwork I still prefer Garmin City Navigator but its just a matter of SD cards.

Just to clarify, say I was touring Portugal using the City Navigator NT Europe for road work and the TOPO Portugal v6 Light for off road sections. Would I need to switch SD cards all the time or can you have one downloaded + one on SD to save changing all the time?

I copied CN Europe onto my Montana drive. It just about fits but I had to delete all the voice files (except English) and imagery to make room.
Mine is an ancient 600 though, so you might not have to do this.